i

which Prospero was forgotten, and Shakspeare | away that would afford the soul any relief whatswooned into himself. And what is the continua-ever from the whole sensation of the supernatural. tion of the passage but a kind of postscript, de- Although we cannot, therefore, in honest keepscribing under the guise of Prospero, Shak- ing with popular language, call Shakspeare, as speare's own agitation with what he had just

written?

Sir, I am vexed;

Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled;
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.

If you be pleased, retire into my cell,

And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

To our imagination the surmise is that Shak-
speare here laid down his pen, and began to pace
his chamber, too agitated to write more that
night.

Ulrici does, the most Christian of poets, we be

lieve him to have been the man in modern times who, breathing an atmosphere full of Christian conceptions, and walking amid a civilization studded with Christian institutions, had his whole being tied by the closest personal links to those highest generalities of the universe which the greatest minds in all ages have ever pondered and meditated, and round which Christianity has thrown its clasp of gold.

Shakspeare, then, we hold to have been essentially a meditative, speculative, and even, in his solitary hours, an abject and melancholy man, In this extreme familiarity with the conception rather than a man of active, firm, and worldly disof mortality in general, and perhaps also in this position. Instead of being a calm, stony observer extreme sensitiveness to the thought of death as of life and nature, as he has been sometimes reprea matter of personal import, all great poets, and sented, we believe him to have been a man of the possibly all great men whatever, have to some ex- gentlest and most troublesome affections; of sentent resembled Shakspeare. For these are the sibility abnormally keen and deep; full of metafeelings of our common nature, on which religion physical longings; liable above most men to and all solemn activity have founded and main- self-distrust, despondency, and mental agitation tained themselves. Space and time are the from causes internal and external; and a prey to largest and the outermost of all human concep- many secret and severe experiences which he did tions; to stand, therefore, incessantly upon these not discuss at the Mitre tavern. This, we say, is extreme conceptions, as upon the perimeter of a no guess; it is a thing certified under his own figure, and to view all inwards from them is the hand and seal. But this being allowed, we are highest exercise of thought to which a human willing to agree with all that is said of him, by being can attain. Accordingly in all great poets way of indicating the immense variety of faculties, there may be discerned this familiarity of the dispositions, and acquirements of which his charimagination with the world, figured as a poor acter was built up. Vast intellectual inquisitivelittle ball pendent in space, and moving forward ness, the readiest and most universal humor, the out of a dark past to a future of light or gloom. truest sagacity and knowledge of the world, the But in this respect Shakspeare exceeds them all; richest and deepest capacity of enjoying all that and in this respect, therefore, no poet is more re-life presented-all this, as applied to Shakspeare, is ligious, more spiritual, more profoundly metaphysical than he. Into an inordinate amount of that outward pressure of the soul against the perimeter of sensible things, infuse the peculiar moral germ of Christianity, and you have the religion of Shakspeare.

a mere string of undeniable commonplaces. The man, as we fancy him, who of all others trod the oftenest the extreme metaphysic walk which bounds our universe in, he was also the man of all others who was related most keenly by every fibre of his being, to all the world of the real and the concrete. Better than any man he knew life to be a dream ; with as vivid a relish as any man he did his part as one of the dreamers. If at one moment life stood before his mental gaze, an illuminated little speck or disc, softly rounded with mysterious sleep, the next moment this mere span shot out into an illimitable plain, whereon he himself stood -a plain covered with forests, parted by seas, studded with cities and huge concourses of men, mapped out into civilizations, over-canopied by stars. Nay, it was precisely because he came and went with such instant transition between the two extremes, that he behaved so genially and sympathetically in the latter. It was precisely because he had done the metaphysic feat so completely once for all, and did not bungle on metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, that he stood forth in the character of the most concrete of poets. Life is an illusion, a show, a phantasm; well, then, that is settled, and I belong to that section of the illusion called London, the seventeenth century, and he acted accordingly. He walked amid the and woody Warwickshire! So he may have said; woods of Warwickshire, and listened to the birds singing in their leafy retreats; he entered the Mitre tavern with Ben Jonson after the theatre was over, and found himself quite properly related as one item in the illusion to that other item in it, a good supper and a cup of canary. He accepted

the world as it was; rejoiced in its joys, was pained by its sorrows, reverenced its dignities, respected its laws, and laughed at its whimsies. It was this very strength, and intimacy, and universality of his relation to the concrete world of nature and life, that caused in him that spirit of acquiescence in things as they were, that evident conservatism of temper, that indifference, or perhaps more, to the specific contemporary forms of social and intellectual movement with which he has sometimes been charged as a fault. The habit of attaching weight to what are called abstractions, of metaphysicizing bit by bit amid the real, is almost an essential feature in the constitution of men who are remarkable for their faith in social progress. It was precisely, therefore, because Shakspeare was such a votary of the concrete, because he walked so firmly on the green and solid sward of that island of life which he knew to be surrounded by a metaphysic sea, that this or that metaphysical proposal with respect to the island itself occupied him but little.

man that ever lived said such splendid extempore things on all subjects universally; no man that ever lived had the faculty of pouring out on all occasions such a flood of the richest and deepest language. He may have had rivals in the art of imagining situations; he had no rival in the power of sending a gush of the appropriate intellectual effusion over the image and body of a situation once conceived. From the jewelled ring on an alderman's finger to the most mountainous thought or deed of man or demon, nothing suggested itself that his speech could not develop and enfold with ease. That excessive fluency which astonished Ben Jonson when he listened to Shakspeare in person, astonishes the world yet. Abundance, ease, redundance, a plenitude of word, sound, and imagery which, were the intellect at work only a little less magnificent, would sometimes end in sheer braggardism and bombast, are the characteristics of Shakspeare's style. Nothing is suppressed, nothing omitted, nothing cancelled. On and on the poet flows, words, thoughts, How, then, did Shakspeare relate himself to and fancies crowding on him as fast as he can this concrete world of nature and life in which his write, all related to the matter on hand, and all lot has been cast? What precise function with poured forth together, to rise and fall on the regard to it, if not that of an active partisan of waves of an established cadence. Such lightness progress, did he accept as devolving naturally on and ease in the manner, and such prodigious him? The answer is easy. Marked out by cir-wealth and depth in the matter, are combined in cumstances and by his own bent and inclination from the vast majority of men who, with greater or less faculty, sometimes perhaps with the greatest, pass their lives in silence, appearing in the world at their time, enjoying it for a season, and returning to the earth again; marked out from among these, and appointed to be one of those whom the whole earth should remember and think of, yet precluded, as we have seen, by his constitution and fortune from certain modes of attaining to this honor-the especial function which in this high place he saw himself called upon to discharge, and by the discharge of which he has ensured his place in perpetuity, was simply that of expressing what he felt and saw. In other words, Shakspeare was specifically and transcendently a literary man. To say that he was the greatest man that ever lived is to provoke a useless controversy and comparisons that lead to nothing between Shakspeare and Cæsar, Shakspeare and Charlemagne, Shakspeare and Cromwell; to say that he was the greatest intellect that ever lived, is to bring the shades of Aristotle and Plato, and Bacon and Newton, and all your other systematic thinkers, grumbling about us, with demands for a definition of intellect, which we are by no means in a position to give; nay, finally, to say that he is the greatest poet that the world has produced (a thing which we would certainly say, were we provoked to do it), would be unnecessarily to hurt the feelings of Homer and Sophocles, and Dante and Milton. What we will say, then, and what we will challenge the world to gainsay, is that he was the greatest expresser that ever lived. This is glory enough, and it leaves the other question open. Other men may have led, on the whole, greater and more expressive lives than he; other men, acting on their fellows through the same medium of speech that he used, may have expended a greater power of thought, and achieved a greater intellectual effect. in one consistent direction; other men, too (though this is very questionable), may have contrived to issue the matter which they did address to the world, in more compact and perfect artistic shapes. But no

no other writer. How the matter was first accumulated, what proportion of it was the acquired capital of former efforts, and what proportion of it welled up in the poet's mind during and in virtue of the very act of speech, it is impossible to say; but this at least may be affirmed without fear of contradiction, that there never was a mind in the world from which, when it was pricked by any occasion whatever, there poured forth on the instant such a stream of precious substance intellectually related to it. By his powers of expression, in fact, Shakspeare has beggared all his posterity, and left inere practitioners of expression nothing possible to do. There is perhaps not a thought, or feeling, or situation really common and generic to human life on which he has not exercised his prerogative; and wherever he has once been, woe to the man that comes after him. He has overgrown the whole system and face of things like a universal ivy, which has left no wall uncovered, no pinnacle unclimbed, no chink unpenetrated. Since he lived, the concrete world has worn a richer surface. He found it great and beautiful, with stripes here and there of the rough old coat seen through the leafy labors of his predecessors; he left it clothed throughout with the wealth and autumnal luxuriance of his own unparalleled language.

This brings us by a very natural connexion to what we have to say of Goethe. For if, with the foregoing impressions on our mind respecting the character and function of the great English poet, we turn to the mask of his German successor and admirer, which has been so long waiting our notice, the first question must infallibly be, what recognition is it possible that, in such circumstances, we can have left for him? In other words, the first consideration that must be taken into account in any attempt to appreciate Goethe is, that he came into a world in which Shakspeare had been before him. For a man who, in the main, was to pursue a course so similar to that which Shakspeare had pursued, this was a matter of incalculable significance. Either, on the one

hand, the value of all that the second man could | peoples and tongues; and, as in this select assemdo, if he adhered to a course precisely similar, blage no duplicates are permitted, the man who must suffer from the fact that he was following in does never so well a second time that which the the footsteps of a predecessor of such unapproach-world has already canonized a man for doing once, able excellence; or, on the other hand, the con- has little chance of being admitted to coëqual sciousness of this, if it came in time, would be honors. More especially, too, in the present case, likely to prevent too close a resemblance between would too close a resemblance to the original, the lives of the two men, by giving a special direc-whether in manner or in purpose, have been retion and character to the efforts of the second. Hear Goethe himself on this very point :

garded in the end as a reason for inferiority in place. As the poet of one branch of the great Germanic family of mankind, Shakspeare belonged We discoursed upon English literature, on the indirectly to the Germans even before they recog greatness of Shakspeare, and on the unfavorable po- nized him; in him all the genuine qualities of sition held by all English dramatic authors who had Teutonic nature, as well as the more special charappeared after that poetical giant. "A dramatic acteristics of English genius, were embodied once talent of any importance," said Goethe, "could not forbear to notice Shakspeare's works, nay, could not for all in the particular form which had chanced forbear to study them. Having studied them, he to be his; and had Goethe been, in any marked must be aware that Shakspeare has already exhausted sense, only a repetition of the same form, he might the whole of human nature in all its tendencies, in all have held his place for some time as the wonder of its heights and depths, and that, in fact, there re- Germany; but, as soon as the course of events had mains for him, the aftercomer, nothing more to do. opened up the communication which was sure to And how could one get courage to put pen to paper, take place at some time between the German and if one were conscious, in an earnest, appreciating the English literatures, and so made his countryspirit, that such unfathomable and unattainable ex-men acquainted with Shakspeare, he would have cellencies were already in existence? It fared better lost his extreme brilliance, and become but a star with me fifty years ago in my own dear Germany. I of the second magnitude. In order, then, that could soon come to an end with all that then existed; Goethe might hold permanently a first rank even it could not long awe me, or occupy my attention. I soon left behind me German literature, and the study he should be a man of a genius quite distinct from among his own countrymen, it was necessary that of it, and turned my thoughts to life and to production. So on and on I went, in my own natural devel-Shakspeare, a man who, having or not having opment, and on and on I fashioned the productions of certain Shakspearean qualities, should at all events epoch after epoch. And at every step of life and signalize such qualities as he had, by a marked development, my standard of excellence was not much character and function of his own. And if this higher than what at such a step I was able to attain. was necessary to secure to Goethe a first rank in But had I been born an Englishman, and had all the literature of Germany, much more was it necthose numerous masterpieces been brought before me essary to ensure his place as one of the intellectual in all their power, at my first dawn of youthful con- potentates of the whole modern world. If Goethe sciousness, they would have overpowered me, and I was to be admitted into this select company at all, should not have known what to do. I could not have it could not be as a mere younger brother of Shakgone on with such fresh light-heartedness, but should have had to bethink myself, and look about for a long when he took him by the hand, would look at with speare, but as a man whom Shakspeare himself, curiosity, as something new in species, produced in the earth since his own time.

time to find some new outlet."-Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, i., p. 114, 115.

All this is very clear and happily expressed. Most Englishmen who have written since Shakspeare have been overawed by the sense of his vast superiority; and Goethe, if he had been an Englishman, would have partaken of the same feeling, and would have been obliged, as he says, to look about for some path in which competition with such a predecessor would have been avoided. Being, however, a Gerinan, and coming at a time when German literature had nothing so great to boast of but that an ardent young man could hope to produce something as good or better, the way was certainly open to him to the attainment, in his own nation, of a position analogous to that which Shakspeare had occupied in his. Goethe might, if he had chosen, have aspired to be the Shakspeare of Germany. Had his tastes and faculties pointed in that direction, there was no reason, special to his own nation, that would have made it very incumbent on him to thwart the tendency of his genius and seek about for a new outlet in order to escape injurious comparisons. But, even under such circumstances, to have pursued a course very similar to that of Shakspeare, and to have been animated by a mere ambition to tread in the footsteps of that master, would have been death to all chance of a reputation among the highest. Great writers do not exclusively belong to the country of their birth; the greatest of all are grouped together on a kind of central platform, in the view of all

Was this, then, the case? Was Goethe, with all his external resemblance in some respects to Shakspeare, a man of such truly individual character, and of so new and marked a function, as to deserve a place among the highest, not in German literature alone, but in the literature of the world as a whole? We do not think that any one competent to give an opinion will reply in the negative.

A glance at the external circumstances of Goethe's life alone (and what a contrast there is between the abundance of biographic material respecting Goethe and the scantiness of our information respecting Shakspeare!) will beget the impression that the man who led such a life must have had opportunities for developing a very unusual character. The main facts in the life of Goethe, as all know, are these:-that he was born at Frankfort-on-the-Main, in 1749, the only surviving son of parents who ranked among the wealthiest in the town; that, having been educated with extreme care, and having received whatever experience could be acquired by an impetuous student-life, free from all ordinary forms of hardship, first at one German town and then at another, he devoted himself, in accordance with his tastes, to a career of literary activity; that, after unwinding himself from several love-affairs, and travelling for the sake of further culture in Italy and other parts of Europe, he settled in early manhood at Weimar, as the intimate friend and counsellor of

the reigning duke of that state; that there, during
a long and honored life, in the course of which he
married an inferior house-keeper kind of person,
of whom we do not hear much, he prosecuted his
literary enterprise with unwearied industry, not
only producing poems, novels, dramas, essays,
treatises, and criticisms in great profusion from
his own pen, but also acting, along with Schiller
and others, as a director and guide of the whole
contemporary
intellectual movement of his native
land; and that, finally, having outlived all his
famous associates, become a widower and a grand-
father, and attained the position not only of the
acknowledged king and patriarch of German liter-
ature, but also, as some thought, of the wisest and
most serene intellect of Europe, he died so late as
1832, in the eighty-third year of his age. All
this, it will be observed, is very different from the
life of the prosperous Warwickshire player, whose
existence had illustrated the early part of the
seventeenth century in England; and necessarily
denoted, at the same time, a very different cast of
mind and temper.

general rule as to the matter of inconstancy, but by accurate knowledge in each case of the whole circumstances of that case. One thing these loveromances of Goethe's early life make clearnamely, that for a being of such extreme sensibility as he was, he had a very strong element of self-control. When he gave up Lilli, it was with tears, and no end of sleepless nights; and yet he gave her up. Shakspeare, we believe (and there is an instance exactly in point in the story of his sonnets), had no such power of breaking clear from connections which his judgment disapproved of. Remorse and return, self-reproaches for his weakness at one moment, followed the next by weakness more abject than before-such, by his own confession, was the conduct, in one such case, of our more passive and gentle-hearted poet. Where Shakspeare was " past cure," and "franticmad with evermore unrest," Goethe but fell into "hypochondria," which reason and resolution enabled him to overcome. Goethe at twenty-five gave up a young and beautiful girl, from the conviction that it was better to do so. Shakspeare at thirty-five was the abject slave of a dark-complexioned woman, who was faithless to him, and whom he cursed in his heart. The sensibilities in the German poet moved from the first, as we have already said, over a firmer basis of permanent character.

Accordingly, such descriptions as we have of • Goethe from those who knew him best, convey the idea of a character notably different from that of the English poet. Of Shakspeare personally we have but one uniform account—that he was a man of gentle presence and disposition, very good company, and of such boundless fluency and intellect- It is chiefly, however, the Goethe of later life ual inventiveness in talk, that his hearers could that the world remembers and thinks of. The not always stand it, but had sometimes to whistle bounding impetuosity is then gone, or rather it is him down in his flights. In Goethe's case we kept back and restrained, so as to form a calm and have two distinct pictures. In youth, as all steady fund of internal energy, capable sometimes accounts agree in stating, he was one of the most of a flash and outbreak, but generally revealing impetuous, bounding, ennui-dispelling natures that itself only in labor and its fruits. What was forover broke in upon a society of ordinary mortals merly the beauty of an Apollo, graceful, light, and assembled to kill time. "He came upon you,' ," full of motion, is now the beauty of a Jupiter, said one who knew him well at this period, "like a composed, stately, serene. "What a sublime wolf in the night." The simile is a splendid one, form!" says Eckermann, describing his first interand it agrees wonderfully with the more subdued view with him. "I forgot to speak for looking at representations of his early years given by Goethe him: I could not look enough. His face is so himself in his Autobiography. Handsome as an powerful and brown! full of wrinkles, and each Apollo and welcome everywhere, he bore all before wrinkle full of expression! And everywhere there him wherever he went, not only by his talent, but is such nobleness and firmness, such repose and also by an exuberance of animal spirits which greatness! He spoke in a slow, composed manswept dulness itself along, took away the breath ner, such as you would expect from an aged monof those who relied on sarcasm and their cool heads, arch." Such is Goethe, as he lasts now in the inspired life and animation into the whole circle, imagination of the world. Living among statues and most especially delighted the ladies. This vi- and books and pictures; daily doing something vacity became even at times a reckless humor, for his own culture and for that of the world; prolific in all kinds of mad freaks and extrava- daily receiving guests and visitors, whom he engances. Whether this impetuosity kept always tertained and instructed with his wise and deep, within the bounds of mere innocent frolic is a yet charming and simple converse; daily correquestion which we need not here raise. Traditions sponding with friends and strangers, and giving are certainly afloat of terrible domestic incidents advice or doing a good turn to some young talent connected with Goethe's youth, both in Frankfort or other-never was such a mind consecrated so and in Weimar; but to what extent these tradi- perseveringly and exclusively to the service of tions are founded on fact is a matter which we Kunst and Literatur. One almost begins to wonhave never yet seen any attempt to decide upon der if it was altogether right that an old man evidence. More authentic for us, and equally should go on, morning after morning, and evening significant, if we could be sure of our ability to after evening, in such a fashion, talking about art appreciate them rightly, are the stories which and science and literature, as if they were the only Goethe himself tells of his various youthful attach- interests in the world; taking his guests into cor ments, and the various ways in which they were ners to have quiet discussions with them on these concluded. In Goethe's own narratives of these subjects, and always finding something new and affairs, there is a confession of error, arising out nice to be said about them. Possibly, indeed, of his disposition passionately to abandon him- this is the fault of those who have reported him, self to the feelings of a moment, without looking and who only took notes when the discourse turned forward to the consequences; but whether this on what they considered the proper Goethean confession is to be converted by his critics into the themes. But that Goethe far outdid Shakspeare harsher accusation of heartlessness and want of in this conscious dedication of himself to a life of principle, is a thing not to be decided by any the intellect, we hold to be as certain as the testi